Podcast #122: Navigating The AI Landscape: Real-World Insights And Challenges

This week Brian sits down with our own AI expert, Jordan Ranous, to discuss and speculate on the challenges facing enterprises and small businesses as they try to get a grip on the hot topic of the decade, Artificial Intelligence. If you have been following StorageReview, then you are aware of some of the tests, reviews, and trials we have been exploring in our lab. Jordan is engaged in almost all AI content posted on our site.

Jordan is an experienced AI technologist with a background working with financial institutions. Brian always offers his guests some tough questions, and Jordan gets the same treatment. AI is such a hot topic, and the buzz in the industry just keeps getting louder, generating more questions than answers. Jordan has a rare talent of being an expert in AI and being able to articulate answers that can be easily understood.

This is the first podcast that we’re actually integrating live with our Discord community so they can interact and ask questions on topics we are hitting at that moment.

If it’s AI-related, Brian and Jordan talk about it. It is certainly worth watching the podcast in its entirety, but if you would like to hop around, we have the time-stamped transcript below.

Join the Discord to participate in future pods in real-time.

00:00 Introduction

Setting the stage for the live event
- Invited the StorageReveiw Discord community
- Exploring AI in the lab
- Hands-on
Recapping Flash Memory Summit (FMS
- AI Vision Demo
- SR Sloths stole the show
AI does not have a universal definition
- Generative AI tools
  - ChatGPT
  - Dall-E
Generative AI vs AGI (artificial general intelligence)
Computer Vision
- A subset of broader AI
- Object recognition
- Image Datasets

05:00 Finetuning the model

Business Intelligence
- Categorizing images
- Identifying brands rather than just shapes
- Self-checkout
- Loss Prevention
Creating the Datasets
- Training data
- Install disparity between enterprise and small retail shops
Tools for AI
- Leveraging the right tools for the job
Implementation challenges
Creating chatbots for various industries

10:00 Chatbots for customer service

Chatbot is programmed to fix the problem, not initiate transferring the call
Pressing zero doesn’t do anything
Creating higher frustration for customers
Catching AI doing something it shouldn’t
AI has the potential to hyperextend in any direction
- Keep an eye on your AI model to keep it honest and focused
- Quality data means quality results

15:00 Security is paramount

Inherent biases in AI
Training data collection is critical
Gather a diverse group to build the training data
Proper finetuning
Be careful of the persona you create
Doom server demo
- AI’s talking trash
- AI gamers fighting each other and making disparaging jokes
- AI understood the assignment and acted upon it
Ethics
Enterprises might be reluctant to provide too much information
- Know where it should go
- And where it might go
- The fear of the unknown

20:00 Active Directory for access levels

Keeping data secure and available to appropriate teams
- Call centers probably do not need access to proprietary marketing material
- NeMo Guardrails
- How questions are asked or how to prompt the question
Hiring Prompt Engineers
Support tools
- Democratizing the toolset

25:00 What’s the on-ramp for small businesses

Set up internally
Create solid prompts
Do the simple stuff first
Ease into the technology
- Understand how it works
- Understand limitations
Use an AI model to analyze CRM data
- Help with sales forecasts
- Analyzing the sales funnel
Use built-in tools
Not every business needs a custom model

30:00 What’s a good starting point

Fund IT for AI APIs
Consume available tools
Employ a paid version of ChatGPT4
Monitor billing
API provides additional freedom

35:00 What about the hardware

Workstations with GPUs
Keep GPUs busy
Parallelize
Rack space consideration
Liquid or Air cooled
TBs of storage
GPUs take slots that might have been used for storage
How much power can a rack support

40:00 Dell’s latest CPU servers

Fast, shared storage
Software
SSDs
- E1.S
Inferencing cards
Ultra-high-speed servers and workstations

45:00 Where cloud can benefit AI

OVH
Cloud is a valuable resource
Hourly billing

50:00 Wrap-up

Podcast video

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Dell XE9680 Review

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8 months ago

Harold Fritts

I have been in the tech industry since IBM created Selectric. My background, though, is writing. So I decided to get out of the pre-sales biz and return to my roots, doing a bit of writing but still being involved in technology.